"Their hands are tied!" I have heard so many moderates assert. "The customers demanded it!"

Was it? Really? Doesn't sound like a commune to me. Sounds more like Walmart[0]. Marx did not specify a particular planning strategy; in fact, his co-author Engels said that "the time of... small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past."

Peter Kropotkin envisions a decentralized, federated economy of communes. Murray Bookchin advocates for decentralized, directly democratic municipalities that federate and coordinate economic decisions from the bottom up. Rosa Luxemburg--co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany who famously warned "socialism or barbarism"--consistently critiqued centralism, asserting, eg "the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."

"The essence of socialist society," Luxemburg declares in her 1918 What Does the Spartacus League Want?[1], "consists in the fact that the great laboring mass ceases to be a dominated mass, but rather, makes the entire political and economic life its own life and gives that life a conscious, free, and autonomous direction."

Whether or not that sounds particularly pleasant or effective, it's clearly not a proposal for central-planning.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal... 1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm

Even massive capitalist firms like Goldman Sachs or Exxon-Mobil essentially operate "communistically" internally to get anything done, ie when someone needs a wrench, a coworker hands it to them without asking what they get in return.

0. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-30/from-f...

-- James Jeffrey Roche (1847 - 1908)

That's a bit unfair. Not all of us who live in it had a hand in building it. In fact, very few of us had the leverage to fight against it.

Edit: my point is just that bribery and blackmail aren't the same as Global Northerners treating charities as synecures.

"Altman" is from the Middle High German alt meaning "old", not from the Proto-Indo-European root al- meaning "beyond."

Or is English the language of the fates?

Edit: this kind of schizoid syncretism is dangerous because it obscures real, empirically verifiable material harms from technology. Every technology is a trade-off. We should follow the advice of (Freemason!!) Benjamin Franklin and not pay too much for our whistle.

Elections are won by spending, especially since Citizens United. Democracy has not survived oligarchical propaganda.